Summary

Episode 95 is a three-guest special featuring Ankit Dudhwewala of CallHippo, Eela Dubey of EduFund, and Aakash Chaudhry of Aakash Institute and Sparkle Ventures. Ankit discusses CallHippo's 10-year bootstrap journey as a communication platform for human and AI sales agents, serving 5,000+ customers across UK, US, Canada, Australia, and India at $8M ARR, and why he believes humans will not buy from AI agents in high-ticket sales. Eela shares EduFund's mission to help 250,000+ Indian families financially plan for education, managing over 1,200 crores in AUM, and the 60% contraction in students going to the US due to H1B and geopolitical issues. She highlights education inflation running at 10-12% and common misconceptions like waiting to start saving. Aakash Chaudhry of Sparkle Ventures (his AI-powered personalized learning venture post-Aakash Institute) discusses making quality education scalable through AI while preserving the human motivation layer, and reflects on the importance of thinking bigger in entrepreneurship.

Full Transcript

Utsav Somani: All right, listeners, live stream number 95. Today is a special for us because we've got three offliners with us. Let's welcome our first guest today, Ankit of Colipo.

Ankit Dudhwewala (CallHippo): Thank you so much, Utav.

Utsav Somani: Ankit, always a big fan of bootstrap successes. So let's introduce Colipo and paint a picture of where the business is today.

Ankit Dudhwewala (CallHippo): So, we started about 10 years back and we have been bootstrapping for about 10 years now. Colipo is a communication platform for human and AI agents. We help companies like, we have AI tech companies, Nestle, Samsung, manage some part of the communication. Usually the communication which happens with their customers.

Ankit Dudhwewala (CallHippo): So we have about 5000 plus customers spread across UK, US, Canada, Australia, India, US and India are primarily the larger market for us.

Utsav Somani: And you started off by being easier than Twilio, where you said that you're giving businesses a virtual phone number basically to access their customers. But how has that business evolved as the world of AI agents and voice agents is upon us now?

Ankit Dudhwewala (CallHippo): So we did not really compete with Twilio, we partnered with Twilio. Twilio provides telephone networks, but telephone networks are not enough. The objective is to ensure team productivity and employee productivity, understand what their teams are doing. Voice AI, so we, with voice AI agent, there's a lot changing. Support, I'm sure is 100% going to move to voice AI agents. But we work in a segment where we are more focused on sales. About 90% of my customers use it for the sales process. And I don't think humans will buy from agents. They want to buy from other humans. And it's going to remain same as what we are betting on.

Ankit Dudhwewala (CallHippo): About 50% of our revenue used to come from search engine optimization about one and a half, two years back. Now that has changed. Search engine optimization has gone to about 10%. Performance marketing used to give us about 20-30% of our revenue. Now that has gone to about 70-80%. So yeah, we are managing through as of now with performance marketing and trying to find new GTM for the product.

Utsav Somani: And the ARR number that you stated publicly is 8 million?

Ankit Dudhwewala (CallHippo): Yeah, we are around $8 million of it now.

Utsav Somani: Ila from EduFund. Ila, welcome to the show.

Eela Dubey (EduFund): Thanks. What's up?

Utsav Somani: Seems like we're having an Ahmedabad and offline special today. Where are you dialing in from?

Eela Dubey (EduFund): Yes, I am. This week, I'm in Ahmedabad.

Utsav Somani: All right. So let's introduce EduFund for our listeners. It starts off with a personal story for you, because you dropped out of Columbia with a 250K pending invoice for your master's education.

Eela Dubey (EduFund): Yes, yes. So I actually did my undergraduate education from NYU. And as a young 18-year-old, you don't really understand the concept of loans, right? And so throughout the entire tenure of my college education, I had these loans compound. I worked two jobs, had a bit of a scholarship, and I made it through. By the time I got ready to do my master's at Columbia, I did have quite a bit amount in loans already. And one semester in, it just did not make financial sense for me to continue. And I did something which I guess is the antithesis of what a typical Indian student does, is I dropped out.

Eela Dubey (EduFund): EduFund helps parents financially plan for their kids' education, with the large and primary focus being helping these parents save and invest. So we help these families reverse engineer a corpus 5, 10, 15 years out, looking what education costs would look like, and then reverse engineer a target plan for them of how much they need to save and invest, and get them to start on that journey. We manage north of $100 million in assets already for a lot of these parents. And then in addition to that, we help parents find additional sources of financing. It's a full stack platform for education planning and financing.

Eela Dubey (EduFund): All in, it will cost you about $320,000 from tuition, living for four years at a US university. And when we look at inflation, we're looking at about 1.5% in dollar terms year on year. And that's not even considering rupee depreciation.

Eela Dubey (EduFund): Education inflation is higher than household inflation, guys. 10 to 12%, right? That's a lot of money.

Eela Dubey (EduFund): Yeah, there, I would argue in the last year, there was about a 60% contraction for students aspiring to go to the United States. So yes, there were a lot of changes, particularly due to the geopolitics.

Eela Dubey (EduFund): We're now at over 250,000 families. Like I mentioned, we manage over 1,200 crores of assets now in that.

Utsav Somani: All right. And now Akash of Akash Institutes and now Sparkle Ventures. Sparkle is an awesome name. And Akash, thank you so much for joining us on the show.

Aakash Chaudhry (Aakash Institute): Absolute pleasure. Looking forward to the chat.

Aakash Chaudhry (Aakash Institute): Well, actually, Sparkle is sort of solving the problem that I was not able to solve with the Akash ecosystem, which was how do you take personalization and bespoke education to masses? I think in this age of technology and AI, I think we have a very, very interesting opportunity to scale quality education, personalized education, you know, more to say that. With Sparkle, that's exactly what we are trying to do.

Aakash Chaudhry (Aakash Institute): We started with one on one, which was actually a teacher led. But when we finished about 50,000 hours of this entire interaction with the teacher and the student on multiple subjects from multiple geographies, we are now teaching in about 20 countries from India.

Aakash Chaudhry (Aakash Institute): I think that's the way forward. The human element is the motivation, inspiration and the regimentation angle. But the problem that we all had earlier was we were too focused on the content. There was lack of information, lack of knowledge. That problem is solved by AI, the content problem, the knowledge problem and the assessment problem.

Aakash Chaudhry (Aakash Institute): I did not think big enough. You know, I marred myself into, I had so many chains around my mind. This is doable. This is not doable. Let's not go there. Nobody has done that. And now what I'm thinking now is how do we induce this open-minded culture in the entrepreneurs, in the students, in the parents?

Utsav Somani: All right, listeners, that's it from us. We'll see you on Friday at four o'clock. Thank you so much for tuning in for our live stream. Episode number 95. Bye-bye.